Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family

| Bob Chapman and Raj Sisodia, June 2016

What’s It All About?

A company is like a family—everybody matters! This might sound like a trite statement, but it’s a sentiment that led Bob Chapman and his company, Barry-Wehmiller, to great success and a culture of strengthened loyalty, creativity, and team morale. By investing time into the people on his team and treating everyone as a person instead of a role, Bob found unique ways to grow together, and his company emerged from challenges like the 2008 Great Recession with little impact to their team members and more productivity and morale than ever before.

In his book Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, Bob offers a behind-the-curtain peek at his career and gives an honest look at both the ups and downs of his career with Barry-Wehmiller. He’s someone I’ve followed and admired since I started out in manufacturing, and so many parts of the story in Everybody Matters resonated deeply with me and felt like they came from the heart of manufacturing.

While I felt the middle of the book could have been a bit tighter, I enjoyed the takeaways about investing time into your team. I also loved how it left readers with clear steps to transform their own teams.

Favorite Quote

“I’m not about getting the best; I’m about enabling the people I have to be the best they can be.”

Biggest Takeaway

The best employees you can have are the ones you have today. By inspiring and guiding your team, you can encourage them to show up ready to put their best foot forward every day.

To help your team members reach their full potential, you might need to work with them to find a role that fits with their skills, or help them develop or improve certain skills. Address performance issues with care, and shift your mindset to remember that if your team is not performing as expected, it may be a reflection of your own leadership.

In every interaction with your team, come from a place of care. Be authentic in conversations, and like Bob Chapman and Barry-Wehmiller, you can find creative ways to weather challenges and grow as a team.

Reviewed by: Trevor Blondeel, January 14, 2023

At Manufacturing Greatness, Trevor Blondeel works with manufacturers to connect the top to the shop. If you’re ready to improve your own organization, contact Trevor to learn how Manufacturing Greatness can help you build stronger leaders and develop a dynamic, high-performing workplace.

Mindfulness Manufacturing

Our show is about providing listeners with real stories that come from a place of experience, transparency, and authenticity. Most importantly it’s about what we learn from these stories and applying Mindfulness in our everyday work and personal lives.
Our intention is to create an environment where people can learn through open honest discussions on how we apply Mindfulness. Although our experiences and stories come from time in a manufacturing environment hence the title “Mindfulness Manufacturing”, we still see our discussions and topics relatable to any organization or profession.

When a mistake occurs on the plant floor, your mind might jump to one question: who caused this issue, and should I write them up for their mistake? But there’s a more productive approach you could be taking—and in this episode of Mindfulness Manufacturing, guest Dr. Jake Mazulewicz breaks it all down!

With a background as a firefighter, EMT, and military paratrooper, Jake knows the challenges of high-hazard industries, and works with organizations to reduce errors and create safer, more reliable workplace environments. In this episode, Jake shares why you can’t procedularize everything, including the way you handle errors and accidents, and offers great insights and stories about how to use connection and curiosity to improve safety, address errors, and strengthen your organization.

3:35 – Procedures and policies are the work that is imagined, and on the floor is how the work actually gets done

4:19 – The work as-done is almost always radically different than the work as-imagined

5:20 – Even when you have standards and people show up wanting to do a good job, you can still see issues that need to be addressed

6:44 – There will always be areas that absolutely need to have procedures in place

8:02 – There are also adaptive jobs, which leans less into procedures and more intro troubleshooting and tacit human knowledge

10:56 – In an ideal environment, both mechanistic and adaptive models are used and respected and needed

12:11 – There are four levels, ranging from strict procedurals to looser guidelines that show what to do, but not how to do it

15:36 – Tacit knowledge gets shared through conversations

16:22 – A way to share important information is to have frontline experts record videos sharing their insights to problems, especially those that are not covered in procedures

19:44 – Through conversation and connection, more knowledge is shared

21:58 – Debriefing also plays a central role

23:45 – If you have strong discipline, you’ll find more freedom

25:31 – In most situations, errors are signals, not defects

27:07 – When an error occurs, be curious and find the deeper cause of the problem

Connect with Jake Mazulewicz

Find him on Linkedin

Visit his website